by Alex Scarrow
‘Non …’ He shrugged. ‘You lazy. No good to me. Not very good worker.’
‘Now … listen here …’ Abraham balled his fists in frustration, taking a step off the wooden dockside on to the bobbing prow of the flatboat, piled high with bundles of beaver pelts. The captain, Jacques, short and stocky, remained unfazed at the young beanpole of a man towering over him.
‘You get half … no more,’ he said calmly.
Abraham felt his temper get the better of him. He reached out and grabbed the collar of the little Frenchman’s chequered shirt in one big-knuckled fist. ‘Curse you … I earned –’
The little man was quicker and more agile than his stocky frame would suggest, and with a deft flick of his strong arms he pulled Abraham off balance. He stuck a booted foot behind his heels and shoved him backwards.
Abraham pinwheeled with his arms, his feet unable to step backwards to recover his balance. He toppled over the side of the flatboat and into the Mississippi river, surfacing from the muddy water coughing and spluttering to hear the rest of the flatboat crew, half a dozen lads his own age or thereabouts, guffawing with laughter.
Jacques bellowed at them to get back to work and they resumed tossing the bales of pelts from one to the other ashore on to the busy dockside.
Abraham pulled himself, dripping and still spluttering, on to the wooden planks of the dock, his hot temper doused for now by the cool river. He turned to Jacques, the man’s broad shoulders shaking with poorly concealed laughter.
‘It ain’t fair, I tell you!’ He pushed a tress of dark sopping hair out of his eyes and glared back at the captain. ‘Hell’s teeth, sir … you are even paying a negro more than I!’
Jacques turned to look at the one dark-skinned member of his crew. He shrugged at that. ‘He a better worker than you, boy.’
Abraham realized by the Frenchman’s undaunted, wrinkled smile that he was not going to get anywhere with him. ‘Well, to Hell with you, then!’ He spat. ‘Crook! You thieving piratical parasite!’ He stood on the edge of the wooden jetty, standing as tall and defiantly as his six-foot-four-inch frame would let him. ‘I shall … I shall go find other work, then!’
Captain Jacques’s bearded smile only widened further. ‘As you wish.’ He waved a hand at him. ‘Good luck, mon ami. You will need it.’
CHAPTER 4
2001, New York
Liam found himself drawn back to the main hall and that splendid brachiosaurus skeleton erected in the middle of it. He was staring up so long at the long arch of vertebrae that comprised its neck that he failed to notice another bustling class of elementary students gather round him, just like the other class, all carrying bright orange activity clipboards. They cooed and orrrrred as the others had, craning their necks to look up at the Cretaceous leviathan.
A teacher, or perhaps it was a museum tour guide, was giving the children the vital statistics of the beast, or, as Maddy would say, they were getting a ‘fact-up’.
‘… roamed the plains in small family groups of no more than a dozen …’
‘Well, that’s not true,’ grunted Liam under his breath.
A tiny boy beside him with thick-framed spectacles and a buzzcut of blond hair that stood erect like a toilet brush looked up at him curiously.
‘… their thick green hides, most probably as thick as rhinoceros hides, probably helped to keep them …’
‘Brown, actually,’ Liam muttered again. ‘They were brown.’
The boy tugged gently at his shirtsleeve and Liam looked down at him. He whispered something Liam couldn’t hear. He squatted down beside the child. ‘What’s that again, fella?’
The boy eyed the guide warily. She was still addressing the assembled children. ‘I said,’ he whispered again, ‘are you a … a real dinosaur man?’
Liam laughed softly. He realized the little chap was asking whether he was an expert, a palaeontologist. He stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well now … yes, I suppose you could say I am.’ He whispered softly, pointing up at the towering bones. ‘I seen these fellas in the flesh, so I have. And I can tell you they’re certainly not green.’
Behind thick milk-bottle lenses, the boy’s eyes widened. ‘You … you seen dinosaurs for, like, real?’
Liam nodded, his face all of a sudden very serious. ‘Aye. Went back in a time machine, so I did. Saw all sorts of dinosaurs … including this big beastie.’ He tapped his nose with his forefinger. ‘But that’s super top secret, young man, all right?’
The boy nodded so vigorously his glasses almost fell off his face.
‘I’ll tell you something else too … We saw ’em in huge herds. Hundreds of the fellas all together in one place. Incredible sight, so it was.’ He winked at the boy. ‘Not small groups like your teacher just said.’
‘Wow,’ the boy gasped.
‘And, like I said, they were brown, like dust, you see, because there wasn’t such a thing as grass back then. They were brown as camouflage against the dirt, not green against grass. See what I mean?’
The boy nodded. ‘Should I put that down on my activity sheet, mister? Brown?’
Liam glanced down at the boy’s clipboard and saw a pop quiz. One of the questions was about the supposed colour of their hides.
He nodded. ‘Sure … put down brown.’
The boy’s forehead furrowed with a difficult dilemma. ‘But … er … I might not get a tick for that.’
Liam shrugged. ‘Aye … maybe so, but at least you’d be right, eh?’
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Becks standing over them, her hair tied back in a tidy ponytail and wearing a plain dark woolly jumper that covered the still very visible scar tissue up her left arm.
‘Liam, you are aware Maddy would not approve of this,’ she cautioned.
‘Ahh … and you see this girl?’ whispered Liam to the boy. The boy looked warily up at her stern expression. ‘She saw these dinosaurs too … smacked one of ’em right on the nose, so she did. Actually started a stampede.’
‘This person does not have security clearance to know about our operations,’ Becks uttered firmly. ‘I recommend that you stop.’
Liam smiled. ‘Right, yes … of course.’ He glanced at the boy’s clipboard. ‘Brown, OK?’ He flicked him a conspiratorial wink and stood up. ‘What’s up, Becks?’
‘It is time now,’ she replied.
‘Uh?’
She nodded at a large digital clock above the entrance. It was a couple of minutes to eleven. ‘Time for us to drink coffee.’
CHAPTER 5
1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln staggered across the bar, knocking several tables along the way, leaving a trail of spilled whisky and snarled curses behind him as he stepped outside into the evening. The paltry sum of money with which that blood-sucking little French trapper had paid him off was all gone now, tossed down his throat during the afternoon.
The evening was still busy with dock workers hefting bales of hides and pelts off a row of flatboats, little more than rafts made from logs lashed together with a rudimentary shack in the middle. Across the river, he could make out the chimney stacks of several paddle steamers impatiently puffing clouds into the crimson sky. Their several decks were lit by gas lamps. To his whisky-soaked mind they looked like giant wedding cakes lined with candles floating on the glistening Mississippi. Quite something to behold.
New Orleans was alive and bustling with activity, even now, with the sky smearing from afternoon, to evening, to night. By contrast, back in New Salem, the hearth fires would be burning and thick log doors battened firmly shut for the night.
This is the place he wanted to be. Needed to be. A young man like him with a keen mind and a quick wit could make his fortune right here among all this … this … opportunity. That was it – even the air in New Orleans tasted of opportunity. If a fellow was clever, used his mind, he could make his fortune on these streets along this dockside. Abraham knew he had the kind of instinct and
smarts to make himself rich. Rich beyond the dreams of a backwoods boy. He just needed that first little chance to get him going. Enough money to get his first enterprise under way.
Not that he knew yet what his first money-making scheme was going to be. And, of course, he’d just gone and spent all the money he had on an ill-tempered afternoon of drinking. Now he was no better than the dozen other drunks tottering up and down the busy twilit thoroughfare: crossbreed trappers and frontiersmen in tattered deerskins, even one or two Pawnee unused to the bottled white-man’s curse, sprawled unconscious amidst stacked sacks of grain … and now him too, swerving to and fro among businessmen wearing stove-pipe hats and their purse-lipped wives in shawls and bonnets, their bags and possessions behind them on the backs of silent, sullen-faced slaves.
That’ll be me one fine day, he mused drunkenly. A gentleman. A rich, successful businessman. Maybe even a politician one day. He grinned like a fool as he considered that prospect, stepping off the wooden-slat pavement on to the dirt of the busy street, lined with deep ruts carved by the cartwheels of an almost constant train of heavily laden wagons.
Perhaps even president, one day.
He belched: a long and loud croak that made heads up and down the thoroughfare turn. It was in fact so satisfyingly loud that he heard the lady in her lace bonnet cry out in disgust. So loud he didn’t hear the thundering of hooves bearing down on him, nor the clatter of beer barrels rolling off the back of the riderless cart, nor the scream from another woman as she realized what was moments away from happening.
Abraham’s whisky-addled mind had just about enough time to process one final thought as the enormous delivery cart careering down Powder Street behind a team of wild-eyed and terrified horses loomed up behind him … and sadly his last thought wasn’t anything noble or profound, nor farseeing. It was nothing more than this …
Well now, sir … That was a mighty fine belch.
CHAPTER 6
2001, New York
‘So, how does Foster look?’ Maddy rephrased Sal’s question.
‘Yes.’ Sal nodded. ‘I mean, is he really dying?’
‘Foster looks no different to the day he walked out on us.’ Maddy took a bite out of her bagel. Still chewing, she continued. ‘Not a single day older. Which, of course, he isn’t … because for him, every time I go see him in Central Park, it’s the same day he walked out.’ She finished chewing and swigged some coffee. ‘It’ll be us that look different to him, I guess. Not the other way round.’
‘Aye,’ nodded Liam. ‘We’ve been together a while now … seems like we’ve been together an eternity, though.’
‘Seventy-five cycles,’ said Bob. ‘One hundred and forty-nine days.’
‘Five months,’ added Sal. She looked up at Liam and Maddy. ‘Jahulla! That makes me fourteen now. My birthday, it was only four months away when I … I was meant to die.’ She didn’t need to elaborate on that. They all knew each other’s recruitment tales.
‘I missed my fourteenth birthday,’ she added quietly.
Becks cocked her head and the appropriate smile for the occasion flashed across her face, as sincere as a screensaver. ‘Many happy returns, Sal Vikram.’
Liam put down the chocolate muffin he’d been peeling out of its paper cup. ‘Hang on, I’ve missed my seventeenth birthday!’ He reached out and squeezed Sal’s hand. ‘So, a happy birthday to us both, so it is.’
‘Yeah,’ she mumbled, ‘yay for us.’
‘Uhh, so,’ Maddy sighed, ‘this was meant to be fun. Not a freakin’ funeral!’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’ll get a cake on the way home, get some candles on it and you can blow ’em out and … and we’ll play some party games or something when we get back. How does that sound?’
She nodded. The start of a smile back on her face. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Party games?’ said Bob. ‘Please explain how to sub-categorize “party games” in reference to “games”?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘They’re just stupid games. You don’t play to win. You just play because it’s a laugh. Like, I dunno … like Charades or Guess Who, or Twister. The more you mess things up the more fun it is.’
The support units looked at each other, silently discussing how to make sense of that. Maddy chuckled. ‘Twister, oh man! You two meatbots haven’t lived until you’ve played a game of Twister!’
She realized Sal and Liam were giving her the same bemused look. ‘Seriously? You guys never heard of it either?’
Liam pursed his lips. ‘Is it a bit like chess?’
‘What? No!’
‘Fidchell? Brandub?’
‘Whuh? Never heard of it. No, it’s kinda like –’
‘Tafl Macrae?’
‘No … no, nothing like that. It’s like –’
‘Pog Ma Gwilly?’
‘Will you shut up a sec?’ she said, exasperated. ‘I’m trying to explain it.’ Her eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion. ‘Hang on, Pog Ma Gwilly? You … you just made that up, didn’t you?’
Liam’s good-natured smile widened to a confessional grin.
She was about to reach across the small round table and playfully cuff his ear when she noticed Sal staring far too intently at the cafe’s hot snacks menu card.
‘Sal? You OK?’
Her brows were locked firmly together.
Liam tapped her arm. ‘You that hungry?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Thirty-seven items on the snack menu …’
‘Uhh … all right.’ Liam looked at Maddy. She shrugged. ‘Oka-a-y.’
‘That was a minute ago. Now,’ Sal continued, ‘there are only thirty-six.’ She looked up at them. ‘Something just vanished off the menu! Just, like, seconds ago.’
Liam looked down at the menu card he’d been studying earlier. ‘Hey … hang on, it’s not there any more.’
Maddy leaned over. ‘What isn’t?’
He shook his head. ‘I was going to order it … and … it’s, well, it’s gone!’
Sal had the menu memorized, almost word for word. ‘The Lincoln Burger.’
‘That’s the very one!’
‘Beef patty,’ she continued, her eyes closed, reciting the missing description, ‘cheese slice covered in thick Patriot Sauce with Freedom Fries on the side.’
‘Aye, that’s what I was going to order!’
‘Sal?’ Maddy reached out for her arm. ‘Did you just feel a time ripple?’
She nodded. ‘I uh … I think so. I wasn’t sure. I thought it was just me feeling sick or something. No breakfast. But then I saw the burger was gone.’
They looked at each other in silence for a moment until finally Maddy bit her lip. ‘We should head back to the arch. Check on this.’
The other end of a minute later, the five of them were hurrying down the North American History hall, weaving their way past elbow-high clusters of noisy children, babbling with excitement, clipboards underarm as they raced from one exhibit case to another on a fact hunt.
‘Could we not get one of them yellow taxis back!’ Liam called ahead, his jaw still working hard on the last of his triple-choc muffin. ‘I got a stitch in me side, already!’
‘Subway,’ Maddy replied over her shoulder, ‘it’ll be quicker. Come on.’
They were near the end of a long glass display case containing mannequins wearing uniforms from the civil war when Bob’s voice boomed down the hall.
‘Attention! Maddy! STOP!’
She stopped in her tracks and looked back down the hall, along with every last child now frozen mid-hunt, silent, eyes locked on Bob’s towering form. He calmly raised an arm and pointed towards Sal, standing beside the glass case staring in at something among the mannequins in civil-war costume.
Maddy quickly made her way through the confused children and an elementary schoolteacher regarding them with a bemused expression.
‘What’s the matter, Sal?’ she said, drawing up beside her. ‘What do you see?’
Sal slowly raised her arm and pointed at
the back wall of the display, between a mannequin wearing the braided and buttoned dark-blue uniform of a Union general and one wearing a similarly ornate tunic in grey. She was pointing at an oil painting hanging on the back wall.
‘And that’s changed too,’ she uttered.
Maddy looked at the face in the painting … the famous painting every schoolkid in America knew by sight. No longer was there that gaunt face, the dark eyes hidden beneath a thunderously brooding brow and that distinctly Mennonite beard. Instead she could see a forgettable-looking balding and portly man with a salt and pepper moustache and a rosy bulbous nose. Beneath the painting was a plaque:
President John Bell 1861–65
‘Oh my God!’ she uttered. ‘Where’s President Lincoln?’
CHAPTER 7
2001, New York
They were back in the archway less than half an hour later, still huffing and puffing after the jog from Marcy Avenue subway station. Liam whimpering about his aching side. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed that muffin,’ he groaned pitifully to himself.
On the screen in front of them, computer-Bob, their field-office system AI, was already spitting out the data pulled in from the external Internet feed.
‘He’s just vanished from history,’ said Sal.
‘Well, from civil-war history,’ Maddy replied as she skim-read the dossier being assembled, fact by fact, on the screen. ‘Nothing in there, nothing at all about him.’
‘This Lincoln fella was quite important, wasn’t he?’
Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Only the most important figure in the war. The most freakin’ important. He held the Union together.’ She saw one of his eyebrows flicker upwards, a sign that he hadn’t a clue and was hoping she was going to elaborate. ‘C’mon, you’ve been reading up a lot recently, right? Hitting the history books.’ She glanced at a pile of books stacked high beside his bunk bed. ‘So, please, tell me you know which guys I’m talking about.’
